Elizabeth Stone Nirenberg

Are You Charitable Enough?

Liz Stone Nirenberg is a Major Gifts Development Officer at Gallaudet University and is the current Board Chair of DAWN, a Washington, D.C.-based domestic violence and sexual assault agency serving deaf survivors. Liz has more than fifteen years of expertise in non-profit organizational sustainability and development. Prior to her current position, she was Project Manager at the Laurent Clerc National Deaf Education Center and an Assistant Director for Individual Giving and Foundation Relations at Gallaudet, where her work supported the establishment of the James L. Sorenson Language and Communication Center. Her community development work includes founding DAWN's annual signature fundraising event, BOOTS. Before moving to Washington, D.C. in 2003, she served as Educational Coordinator at the pioneering Abused Deaf Women's Advocacy Services (ADWAS) agency in Seattle, Washington. She, along with Marilyn J. Smith, founder and former executive director of ADWAS, trained deaf communities across the country to replicate ADWAS' model as part of the Justice for Deaf Victims National Training project funded by the United States Department of Justice. Later in her career, Liz also worked at Vera Institute of Justice's Accessing Safety Initiative, as a technical assistance provider focusing on capacity building and systems change for grantees that were funded by the Department of Justice's Office on Violence Against Women.

Liz received her Bachelor's in Social Work at Rochester Institute of Technology and her MPA at American University's School of Public Affairs, with a concentration in nonprofit management and fundraising. She was also named an Emerging Scholar at The Urban Institute's Center on Nonprofits and Philanthropy. Liz knows that fundraising can be fun, inspiring, and transcendent, and sees philanthropy as a way to connect different people to change the world, one action at a time. Her vision is to support emerging deaf philanthropists to become visionaries who "think big" for all deaf people, and for all humanity.